Ten Blog Posts to Start the School Year: How Do You Refuel?

Summer, summer, summertime!

Tomorrow is the first day of school and today teachers are officially back to the grind. Last night, I didn't feel ready. A summer that started with daily swimming lessons and constant sunscreen application, bore trips with carsick kids to Oregon and Washington DC, and closed with days of writing bookended by life with two kids is over. This summer didn't provide the rest and reflection I'm used to having to reboot for the new school year. But tomorrow the kids are coming, so I need to ready my mind and my heart in a hurry.

In the early days of this summer break, I got a message from an acquaintance. She is a mother and a teacher too, and she wanted to know more about my teaching philosophy. Do I use a certain program or strategies? Is there a workshop that has been my model? In essence, she wants to know how I do what I do.

All summer I've been thinking about how to answer her questions. I think about my teaching all of the time, but I hadn’t written my thoughts about teaching down since my credentialing program almost twenty years ago. So, I'm thinking about her questions and others that have come up this summer, and I'm going to try to write something about my work for the next ten days to remind myself why I do what I do. 

But, I'm also crowd-sourcing this question: How do you do it? How do you find motivation in the day-to-day grind? And teachers, I'm looking for your wisdom in particular. It wasn't until I started teaching that I realized the necessity of summer vacation, so how are you refueled by summer? I'll post my response and hopefully some responses from readers tomorrow.
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